


Ain't no place for no hero

by Chiomi



Series: Theophages [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Endgame Sterek, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Minor Character Death, Parent Death, Past Stiles Stilinski/Malia Tate, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-03
Updated: 2015-04-19
Packaged: 2018-03-20 23:59:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 9
Words: 13,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3669903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chiomi/pseuds/Chiomi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles' mom was like the sun. Everything around her seemed brighter, and she made everything happier. She could kiss his injuries better, too, and for real, not like Ms. McCall with her big first aid kit and careful hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I know just what you runnin' from

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wolftraps (AlwaysBoth)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlwaysBoth/gifts).



> This is a sequel to _I was just hoping that these storm-filled skies would clear_ , but should make sense even without having read it. The magic system is adapted from Jesse Hajicek's novel _The God Eaters_.
> 
> Thanks to Alexis for help with plotting and betaing!
> 
> This should update every day between now and when it's done.
> 
> Happy birthday, Tronion.

His mom was like the sun. Everything around her seemed brighter, and she made everything happier. She could kiss his injuries better, too, and for real, not like Ms. McCall with her big first aid kit and careful hands.

His mom said that it was a secret, though, that magic was just for them. Stiles didn’t know why he couldn’t tell Scott about the way the flowers listened to her, but Scott probably wouldn’t think it was cool anyway, because flowers made it hard for Scott to breathe. Stiles gets some of the feeling he gets from gardening when he’s around Scott, but if his mom says to keep this separate, he can.

His mom was the sun, and Stiles just wanted to bask in her light and warmth. As he got older, though, it felt like they were drifting apart, and he couldn’t get the same warmth from her even when he was so jittery and moving so much that there was no way she could be ignoring him. They got him pills for that, because his brain was wrong somehow, and he thought for a while that maybe she’d stopped loving him as much because he was built bad.

He couldn’t keep it in forever, and one afternoon after he’d talked to his grandma and she’d told him she loved him, Stiles started crying and couldn’t stop. “You don’t love me anymore,” he sobbed into his mom’s stomach, hands fisted in her shirt so she couldn’t run away.

His mom hugged him tight. “No, honey, no, I love you, I love you most out of anything in the world.”

“You never spend time with my anymore because you hate me because I’m stupid.”

“Oh, baby. Patxi, you’re not stupid, you’re my perfect little boy and I love you and we’ll spend more time together, I promise. I’m so sorry I didn’t notice you’d been hurting. I just see you getting so big and think you don’t need me anymore.”

“I’ll never not need you,” Stiles says, wiping his nose on her shirt.

His mom runs a hand over the back of his head. “Oh, honey.”

They spend time together again, and Stiles soaks up her sunlight. She makes the flowers bloom, and shows him how to do it, too, how to coax pale purple blooms from the rosemary and richer purples from the lavender, and it’s their special thing. His dad can’t do it, but he comes to watch when Stiles does it, and says he’s really proud, though he seems kind of sad. His mom and dad are looking at each other while he plays in the garden, some kind of boring grown-up conversation happening with their faces.

His dad goes back inside, and doesn’t come watch again, but that doesn’t bug Stiles, because it’s him and his mom’s thing, and he and his dad do other stuff.

Stiles grows, and he turns 8, and his mom’s so happy for him she cries. He’s learned that sometimes girls cry when they’re happy, which seems weird, but his mom said.

His mom fades with the fall. She doesn’t shine as bright, and has Stiles do more of the work in the garden, with her just helping. She stares at the flowers a lot, and makes Stiles tell her their names, sometimes lots of times.

He catches his dad crying, once, and he doesn’t think it’s because he’s happy.

The next day the rain starts, and it doesn’t stop for weeks.

By Christmas, his mom takes more pills than Stiles does. Like, a lot more. And Ms. McCall sometimes cries when Stiles goes over to their house, and he knows it’s because Ms. McCall works at the hospital.

Even mom’s friend Mrs. Talia looks sad when she comes over, and Mrs. Talia is never sad. She’s like a superhero.

Stiles tries to not make too much noise in the house, which is even harder now, because he feels all full of energy all the time. His mom signs him up for T-ball, so that’s good. Stiles likes the feel when the bat hits the ball and goes flying.

On weekends, because Stiles is getting so grown up, his dad even takes him to the shooting range and shows him how guns work. He’s not allowed to fire one, because he’s not that big yet, but it’s still really cool except his mom looks a little less bright every time he comes home.

On Groundhog Day his mom goes into the hospital to stay for a while. Jackson Whittemore says it’s because she’s dying and Stiles only doesn’t know that because he’s a baby. Jackson Whittemore is a jerk, and Stiles gives him a bloody nose. It’s totally worth the detention, because Jackson shouldn’t lie like that.

Stiles spends every moment he can in the hospital with his mom, but it seems like the more time he spends with her the worse she gets.

It’s starting to look - _his mom might die_. She loses track of stuff, too, doesn’t know what’s going on. Stiles doesn’t know how to say the words they use, so he looks them up. Frontotemporal dementia. It sounds really bad, but the internet doesn’t say it makes people fade away like this.

One afternoon when Stiles knows he’ll have the time when no one will interrupt him, he tries to make her have more life the way he’d made the flowers bloom.

His mom’s eyes open really wide and she squeezes her hand really hard around his. She’s all pink instead of pale like she has been. “Oh, honey,” she says, and there’s something terrible in her voice.

She doesn’t say anything else, though, and her eyes close, and a minute later one of the machines starts beeping really loud, and then the nurses come and they make him leave the room.

They don’t tell him anything until his dad gets there, wild-eyed and wet from the rain.

They tell him his mom is dead.

Stiles knows he killed her.

-

They don’t talk about any of it.

The rain stays for a week, making it wet even for Spring.

When it clears, the garden is a ruin.

Neither Stiles nor his dad make any attempt to repair it.

-

After Scott gets bitten, he visits his mom in the graveyard. There’s weirder stuff than their secret, and he wishes he could talk to her. It’s a bright clear day, so after he’s visited her gravestone and the awful absence entombed there, he goes in search of the Hale grave. It’s sort of reassuring that there’s someone who’s lost more than him.

There’s a weird feeling around their grave, like possibility or coming lightning. Stiles keeps going, because it’s interesting now, and tries to identify the feeling and pick it apart. There’s a kind of give to it, sort of like cotton candy but more ephemeral. The feeling fades, and the graveyard’s just a graveyard.

Deaton’s there, though, so Stiles either lost some time or Deaton is still a freaky ninja. Stiles is pretty sure it’s the second.

“Did you know the Hales, Stiles?”

“No,” he says, then pauses. He’d known Talia, a little, sort of, through his mom. He can name her favorite cookie now, though, absolutely inexplicably. “Though it feels like I did, sometimes.”

Deaton nods, and Stiles leaves. He’s got homework to do, still.

-

When the men break into his room, he assumes they’re hunters sent by Gerard. He’s generally pretty chill about it, but the idea that the septuagenarian asshole got away and might come back to hurt them kind of haunts him. The first sign that anything is different is the tug on the part of himself that he’s only ever associated with gardening, that had only barely flickered when he’d tried to cage Jackson.

The tug enrages him, but Stiles only gets in one good hit before pain explodes on the side of his face.

He comes to somewhere in the desert, and someone presses a needle to his skin before he can register anything but being on the road.

When he comes to again, it’s to the feeling that someone’s taking a crowbar to his brain. Everything is thick and fuzzy in counterpoint to the sharp bright pain, and Stiles is pissed. He’s tied to a chair, too, and he tugs at his wrists, because that’s how people get loose, right? He doesn’t have any practical experience. His dad had taught him how to get attention if he’d been stuck in the trunk of a car, how to throw a punch, but kidnapping hadn’t been all that much of a concern before this year.

This fucking year.

Two men come into the building, and they look like siblings. And like weasels.

“You are going to get so much jail time for this it’s not even funny.”

The younger looking one punches Stiles in the face. Stiles tongues the inside of his cheek where it feels like his teeth have cut it, and spits blood. “No talking. You didn’t earn the pattern you’re carrying, and you didn’t earn the right to speak.”

The next couple hours spin out like that: pain, cryptic bullshit, and more pain. Some of it’s not - not quite physical. He doesn’t know what it is, but it’s a raw scrape against the edges of some part of him that he’s apparently super attached to, the way the pain echoes from his teeth to his toes.

He doesn’t scream. There’s probably no point in trying to hold it back, but seriously fuck these guys.

He maybe passes out a bit, because then his dad’s there.

And Deaton, for some ungodly reason.

Stiles is like three quarters unconscious anyway, so he just goes with it.

-

When they’re home, they don’t really talk about it, which is kind of weird as hell, but Stiles is happy with it, or as happy as he is with anything. He thinks maybe his dad’s not asking because he thinks Stiles will lie to him more, and it’s just kind of . . . whatever, everything is like that.

No one else, it seems, had even noticed he was gone, which kind of hurts. Stiles avoids Scott for a while because of it.

He avoids Deaton, too, even though he could maybe ask Deaton what was up, because Deaton looks at him like he’s a monster sometimes, and Stiles isn’t even the one who can grow claws.

-

He works on trying to identify the thing he’d felt in Texas without the horrible pain. It doesn’t - it’s hard. Focusing is an all or nothing thing for him, and it’s not always super voluntary, and focusing on a thing that might not even really exist in any kind of meaningful way -

Stiles spends a lot of the summer helping Derek track Boyd and Erica, because it’s just as frustrating, but at least it’s real.

-

The nogitsune tells lies, lies upon lies upon lies. Stiles wasn’t even sure of his presence, at first, but when the knowledge comes, it comes like a hammer.

After, when the nightmares are bad enough that he wants to scream, Stiles bites his lip bloody keeping it in. Stiles doesn’t deserve his dad coming to comfort him, not when -

Fuck.

-

He’s himself again, and being around Scott feels different, like he doesn’t quite fit in with him the same. Stiles wants to blame the twins, or Isaac, or anyone else, but he knows it’s that Scott’s an alpha now. The pattern of him has changed, Stiles-shaped bite marks at the edges of him having healed while Stiles was possessed.

True Alphas are born, not made, said Deaton. For Scott to have been a beta as long as he was -

Growing up is a thing, yeah, and coming in to one’s own. But it seems more likely that there had to have been something standing in his way, siphoning off his potential.

He can never tell Scott any of this, because Scott would hate him.

-

When there aren’t prices on their heads anymore, Stiles takes the time to breathe. Everyone else does, too - Malia does so right in his ear from where she’s spooning him aggressively. Stiles checks his phone and reaches back to pat Malia on the hip. “Hey. It’s cartoons and cereal time.”

“Mm,” she says, and burrows her face into his neck. “Mornings are worse when you’re human.”

“That’s why they invented Frosted Flakes,” he says.

“They’re grrreat,” she mumbles sleepily into his skin. They’ve been talking about memes, the past few days, and how the people at school aren’t actually trying to confuse her.

The two of them get big bowls of cereal and sit down in front of Netflix - Stiles may be recreating a beloved childhood experience that Malia missed a few years of, but he’s not a _heathen_.

They’re halfway through an episode of Spongebob when Malia says, out of the blue, “Lydia says I should stop having sex with you.”

Stiles blinks at her, incapable of anything else. “Okay,” he says cautiously.

“She says we’re codependent.”

His heart lurches, because _fuck Lydia_. Malia makes him feel human, and he’s teaching her to be more human, and he can actually sleep through the night when she’s next to him, so fuck her for trying to say it’s not healthy.

She might be right, but fuck her anyway. “Okay. Does that mean -”

“I want to try dating boys who don’t know. I think I can probably pass for human now, right? And you told me humans prefer monogamy unless carefully negotiated.”

“Uh, yeah. Would you still want to do cartoons?”

Malia flashes a smile at him, and her smile could light up a room, still, even as Stiles feels set adrift. “Yes. I’ll still always come back for you, Stiles.”

It’s abrupt and Stiles has no say, which is sort of par for the course with Malia.

They watch a few hours of cartoons before Malia heads back to her dad’s place - Mr. Tate, not Peter, because Peter’s never going to be anyone’s father figure. He’s never seemed to have a problem with Malia staying over, and Stiles has never questioned it because Mr. Tate is a scary dude with guns and Stiles has been regularly screwing his daughter. And, like, bodily autonomy and whatever, but Mr. Tate is a nutjob who set dozens of traps for years. Stiles doesn’t want to count on anything as regards him, and definitely doesn’t want to provoke him.

Malia kisses him on the mouth before she leaves, and it’s kind of final.

Stiles goes for a run, after. He sticks his phone and his keys and a baggy of mountain ash in the pocket of his sweats and ties them tight. He didn’t used to take this much with him on runs.

Of course, he also didn’t used to run anywhere except Lacrosse training and gym class, so things are changing anyway.

He drives out to the Preserve and runs some of the better-marked trails there. People do run through town, but he doesn’t want to deal with other people right now. They still give him looks because of the whole thing where the nogitsune had been caught on camera in the hospital.

Stiles runs, feet surer than they would have been a year ago. He stays on the well-trodden paths, because if he tries to make his own way he invariably ends up at the nemeton. He runs for - whatever, the trails are marked with distances, but he doesn’t actually care. He just wants to be exhausted. He’s finished all his homework for the weekend, finished the paper that’s not due for another week, finished as much of his research into his own power that he ever wants to do. He’s found out more than he wanted to, really: he’d have been happier without them. He’d have been happier, and also probably still had a mom.

Stiles runs faster.


	2. And what matters ain't the "who's baddest" but

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sleeping alone is the worst.

By Friday Scott is giving him worried looks and Lydia is making purse-lipped judgmental faces at him, so she’s worried too. Stiles wishes he could say something that sounded less pathetic than ‘my girlfriend broke up with me and I can’t sleep alone.’

But, well, his girlfriend broke up with him and he can’t sleep alone.

The nightmares are pretty much the opposite of great, when he can even get to sleep, and his dad’s been on nights, so when he wakes up screaming he’s got to talk _himself_ down. It’s not going well.

The worst part is that when he’s fighting to stay awake, there’s a long-honed instinct in him that has him reaching to Scott for energy, and he has to fight that impulse, too.

Malia has her date drop her off at his house that night. Stiles watches Rodriguez drive away and contemplates the fact that he and his friends are not only the biggest freaks in town but starting to get a reputation for it.

“Did Lydia send you?” he asks warily.

“No,” Malia says, going up the stairs. He follows her as she goes straight to his dresser and grabs one of his T-shirts. “But you look tired, and I’m your anchor. Plus it’s easier than coming over in the morning for cartoons.”

She strips off her shirt and bra unselfconsciously and puts on the T-shirt, then looks at Stiles and then pointedly at the bed.

Stiles crawls in, and she slides in after him, spooning him aggressively. Stiles goes out like a light.

It’s nearly noon when he wakes up, and Malia is still next to him, doing something on her phone. “You should talk to Derek about finding a better anchor. Other people should never be your anchor. My mom was mine.”

Stiles isn’t awake enough to articulate his displeasure, so he just grunts and sticks his head in his pillow. He’s not used to seeking out Derek unless someone’s life is on the line, and the only person at risk here is Stiles, so it doesn’t feel like any kind of justification. Especially since Derek, by all accounts, is getting his life together: he’d managed to have a girlfriend who was at least upfront about her murderous tendencies, he was able to shift to a full wolf, and he was playing mentor to Scott and Malia and Liam without any leather jackets or creepy locker room lurking involved.

Derek’s getting his life in order, and Stiles is learning that he eats people. So there’s pretty much no way Stiles hanging around Derek will work well for Derek.

“Nngh,” says Stiles, and then stretches. “Maybe.”

“No, really,” Malia says. It’s rare for her to be insistent with her words. “I don’t know what humans turn into when they don’t have anchors, but it’s not going to go well for the people who care about you.”

“Why can’t you just stay?” It comes out resentful, and Stiles - okay, yeah, he’s kind of all about the emotional manipulation, but he’s been growing as a person, dammit.

“Because people can’t, always,” she snaps.

Stiles snaps out of it. She’s brusque and pushy, but not usually snappish. He’s being a dick. He still resents all of this, but he can stop being a dick. “Right, sorry. Do you want French toast?”

She nods.

Stiles stumbles downstairs, and his dad’s already outside, reading a novel in the sun. If it weren’t for the drought, he’d probably be mowing the lawn. As is, the sad yellow stuff hasn’t really grown at all in a couple months. They could theoretically water mornings or evenings certain days, but even if either of them could keep track and was around, his dad wants to set an example. Or maybe just doesn’t want to mow. They’re both pretty valid reasons.

Stiles starts French toast, one of the few things he reliably doesn’t screw up, then ducks outside to see if his dad wants some. “Yo, d’you want brunch?”

His dad raises an eyebrow. “You’re actually cooking?”

Stiles makes a face, trying to convey that he screwed up with his ex-girlfriend and now she’s mad at him and oh, yeah, by the way, she slept over and everything is complicated.

“Right,” his dad says, and comes inside.

It’s not the most awkward meal he’s ever had, but it’s pretty far up there. Whatever. Malia’s aware enough of social stuff now to feel the awkwardness, and she can take it as payback for trying to make him be a better person.

Wow, he’s fucked up sometimes.

 


	3. The ones who stop you fallin' from your ladder, baby

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trying to find an anchor.

He goes to see Derek on Sunday.

Or rather, he shows up at Derek’s loft a little past 7am on Sunday morning and sits in the parking lot. He doesn’t - he’s fine. He’ll be able to cope. It’s not like he won’t need to be pulling all-nighters in college, and humans don’t actually need anchors.

There’s a tap on his passenger-side window, and Stiles starts violently. Derek quirks an eyebrow at him in judgement and crosses his arms. He doesn’t look mad, at least: amused, mostly, and also a little sweaty.

Stiles takes off his seatbelt and Derek takes a step back to let Stiles get out of his Jeep. “Malia says you’re having problems with control.”

Stiles runs a hand over his hair. “It’s not like I’ve ever been able to sleep great. And I’m not, like, going on murder sprees or anything.”

Derek snorts. “Not yet.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Stiles says, but some of the tension’s gone out of him. Apparently Derek being a better person now or whatever hasn’t made him completely stop being an asshole.

“Come on up,” Derek says, jerking his head towards the building. “I’ll make breakfast.”

Derek’s obviously been out running, and he leaves Stiles sitting in his living room while he showers. Stiles doesn’t like being left with nothing to do, especially since the sound of water running just reminds him that Derek is all wet and naked, so he looks over some of the stuff on his phone. One of the things Lydia has done when not busy ruining his love life is steal all of his books about werewolves and digitized them. She’s converted them to epubs, but he still has the original PDFs she sent, and he prefers that, since it means he can poke at the weird feeling he gets when he looks at the pencilled-in inscriptions to various dead Hales. His mom had bought them at the estate sale after the fire - there hadn’t been much - and it hadn’t really seemed morbid to him until he was actually spending time with Hales.

The light streaming in Derek’s open windows is almost painful. It’s worse, though, when Derek comes out in just a pair of jeans, torso all wet and lit up by the adulating morning sun. Stiles is more or less resigned to being helplessly attracted to anyone related to the Hales (with Peter as the obvious exception), but Derek just isn’t fair.

Derek makes some kind of egg thing with vegetables that manages to smell amazing. He doesn’t talk while he does it, either, which makes Stiles sort of twitchy. There’d been, like, implications of pending advice.

Derek sticks two plates of food on his kitchen island. “Breakfast is ready.”

Stiles squirms onto one of the stools at the island and starts shoveling food in his face. Since it’s the weekend and nothing is in imminent danger of killing them, he skipped his Adderall, which pretty much means he’s going to be a bottomless pit all day.

Derek doesn’t say anything until their plates are clear and Stiles is leaning back to give his stomach more room. “This is why I told Scott -”

He pauses, and there’s an Allison-shaped hole in the conversation. “Relationships with living people change. You need something stable as an anchor.”

“Humans don’t need anchors,” Stiles points out.

Derek snorts, gets up, and grabs their plates. “Sure. That definitely sounds accurate. We don’t know any humans deeply attached to any kind of code. And you’re definitely a normal human.”

Stiles glares at the back of Derek’s head. “Go fuck yourself.”

Derek turns just enough that Stiles can see his smirk.

Stiles runs a hand over his mouth, wiping away his own smile. “So you know I can -”

“You’re like Deaton,” Derek says, a little too firmly. Deaton, as far as they know, hasn’t killed anyone, so that’s - it’s good. Probably. Deaton may be kind of shady and suspicious, but he’s apparently saved Derek’s life, and he helped bring Stiles back from that fun kidnapping adventure, even if he didn’t explain jack shit. His dad likes Deaton, too. Stiles has mixed feelings about Deaton.

“Then why won’t he talk to me?”

“I think your kind tend to be kind of solitary.”

“ _My kind_? What the Hell is my kind?” There’s an itch under his skin to know, more pressing than the curiosity that normally drives him.

Derek finishes the dishes and sets them in the drying rack. “Theophage.”

“The- God eaters? Really? I’m pretty sure I’ve never met a God, let alone eaten one.” Still, his pulse is rising in his ears at the word.

“I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be a more impressive way of saying soul eater. My mom knew one, said they never ran in packs because the strongest would always absorb the weaker ones to make their own power bigger.”

Breakfast feels like lead in his stomach now. He swallows. “Yeah, that sounds about right.” His voice has gone scratchy.

Outside, the wind picks up.

Derek looks at him, leaning back against the counter. “So you need an anchor.”

“Yeah, well, damage is already pretty much done.”

Derek’s face does a complicated thing. “Your mom.”

The windows rattle, and Stiles props his elbows on the island and his head on his hands. “It’s not like I knew what I was doing, even if I did have an anchor.” Stiles swallows again, and spills the rest of it. “I think I was siphoning off Scott, too, for a long time.”

Derek crosses his arms - not like he’s angry, just like he does whenever he’s not doing something else with them. “But he’s not dead.”

“No, but he didn’t become a True Alpha until I was possessed. It’s kind of a thing.”

Derek looks down and away, then back at Stiles, his face determined. “We’ll find you an anchor so you can control it.”

 


	4. And you feel like you feelin' now

Anger’s an incredibly shitty anchor and Stiles is surprised Derek even has him try it. Admittedly, this is their second week of trying, but still.

“You’re not angry enough, Stiles.”

“Yeah? And how would you know? Not all of us express our anger by throwing people around.”

Derek circles him where he’s sat on the couch. “Wolves can always tell, and you’re not angry enough to use it for control.”

“If I get any angrier, I’ll be out of control!” Stiles shouts, then drops back against the couch as thunder rolls through the clear sky. “And great, I’ve probably started a forest fire.”

Derek stills, foot not quite touching the ground. After a few seconds’ pause, it drops to the floor. Stiles glares at his bare toes. Bare toes are cheating. After this long, Stiles is used to Derek’s bare chest - sort of, probably like you’d get used to being able to see David every day - but bare toes make him look all soft and like he’s not immediately prepared to run for his life. It’s inexcusably cute. “You can control the weather?”

Stiles shrugs uncomfortably. “Control’s a bad word for it, considering.”

Derek sits down on the couch next to Stiles. “Did you sleep last night?”

“Couple hours,” Stiles says. “Doesn’t matter, I’ll be fine for another several days like this.”

“Isn’t finals this week?”

Stiles shrugs again. “Insomnia means plenty of study time.”

“That was the best part of being part of an established pack,” Derek says.

“Huh?”

Derek stretches his legs out in front of him and crosses them at the ankle. “The alpha memory thing - my mom used it to have us know what everyone else had learned in school. Having the memories implanted makes them stick better.”

“She used the freaky thing where you put your claws in someone’s spine for _studying_?”

Derek’s turn to shrug. “It happened a lot. She was training Laura to be alpha by passing on some of her handed-down memories at a time, and she made everyone forget where the nemeton was every time someone else stumbled on it. And even if she did mess up the spine, it’d heal in a few hours.”

“That is incredibly fucking creepy, dude.”

Derek shrugs again, but his face closes down a little and his shoulders are tighter after he shrugs than they were before.

Stiles runs a hand over his face and up over his hair, still trying to shake his residual irritation. “Malia’s talking about moving back to the woods.”

“Yes,” Derek says, and eyes Stiles warily, like Stiles is going to say something assholeish. Which, okay, fair.

“Would she be, like, okay?”

Derek shrugs again. “Sometimes werewolves do it, too.”

Another pause. “I hope she stays,” Stiles says.

“She still shouldn’t be your anchor,” Derek says, and pats Stiles on the knee on his way to getting up.

“What even is your anchor now? You’re way too mellow to still be using anger.”

Derek hesitates, and Stiles has a sudden fear that it’s super personal or embarrassing or traumatizing. Knowing Derek, probably traumatizing. “No, never mind, it’s fine. So, if the weather thing’s a surprise, what can theophages usually do?”

“Marin got her students to open up more. Deaton uses it to help healing, I think. I don’t - we never really talked about it much. General advice from my mom was to just stay away.”

“Oh.” Stiles frowns at the wall.

Derek squeezes the back of Stiles’ neck, wordless reassurance that he’s going to keep making terrible decisions and keep letting Stiles hang around.

Stiles’ phone buzzes in his pocket, and he pulls it out. There’s a text from his dad:

_Forest fire. Stay out of the Preserve._

 


	5. And doin' things just to please your crowd

“Shit. Fucking _shit_. I did start a forest fire.”

Derek goes very pale.

Stiles scrambles for his keys and goes for the door. He’s hauling it shut when Derek slams his hand against it. “I’m coming with you.”

“You don’t -”

“Shut up,” Derek snarls.

Stiles gives up and just runs down the stairs. He started the fire with magic, he can stop it that way. Make it rain or something.

It’s not until he’s in Roscoe, Derek in the passenger seat, that he notices Derek is wearing sandals and still no shirt. Yeah, makes sense. Fires are bad even on a normal year - this year it could be fatal. Not really time to be prioritizing clothes.

Stiles tries to reach for - for his power while he’s driving. It’s hard to concentrate, because the road still deserves some attention, and he’s just not used to thinking about magic. It shouldn’t be real, not like this, not when even having it meant -

There we go, apparently. Dark clouds are scudding in from the coast. All he needs to do is feel abjectly awful about everything to activate his superpowers. Great.

Stiles drives towards the overlook, because he needs to be able to see to direct the rain. Probably? He wants to see, anyway, to see if it’s working. He parks Roscoe and he and Derek both get out. There’s smoke rising from the trees, thick and white and lit from underneath. The flames he can see licking up are - shit, they’re pretty contained, for a forest fire, but the area’s the same size as his house. The guilt and horror of it spikes through him, and it starts to rain.

The air’s still warm and humid, but the pressure’s dropping sharply and Stiles can almost feel the temperature drop. Good. It’ll rain for real, then, not some piddly thing. It’ll rain the fire out, and then they can find some kind of permanent way to get this under control.

Derek stands beside him, coiled like there’s something he’ll be able to attack.

Stiles wishes he weren’t here. Fire is - he wishes Derek were at home.

The wind picks up, driving the rain at an angle. The air above the fire looks like steam, but the fire itself doesn’t look like it’s dying down at all. Stiles reaches out carefully with the senses that don’t feel quite real, and it’s like when he stands up after a research binge: there’s an almost painful stretch and a sense of unfurling.

He can feel the storm, then, and it’s almost like proprioception if his body were a mile across and half a mile high. He tugs, a little, a the part that feels like slaking a thirst, and shivers in his physical body as the rain comes down harder. His shirt feels soaked, but his body, this small human body, isn’t all that important right now. He has a fire to put out.

The rain buckets down, and he can feel a sort of resistance to increased intensity. The fire’s not out yet, though: he can feel a warm spot beneath him.

“Stiles!”

Stiles blinks, and he’s aware of his small cold physical body again. Derek’s hand is on his arm, dragging him back towards Roscoe. “What?”

“The ground’s destabilized,” Derek says grimly.

“But the fire’s not out yet! It’s only been a couple minutes.” Stiles ends up going with him anyway, because werewolf strength doesn’t leave much room for negotiation.

“It’s been half an hour of torrential rain,” Derek corrects. “I can hear the ground moving.”

Stiles can hear the ground moving now, too, and his first impulse is to freeze. No, fuck no. They do not need any landslides, especially not any that’ll block the road. His dad will kill him if he gets stranded out here.

The road ends up not being the problem.

The ground crumbles beneath them.

 


	6. And I suffer, but I ain't gonna cut you 'cause -

The world’s just brown and grey and black in chaos, all seasoned with pain.

Stiles is filled with a paralyzing fear that he’s going to drown in mud.

The slide seems to go on forever, an irresistible force that’s going to swallow them whole.

There’s an impact, and even that seems to go on forever in gradients of crashing. Derek still has a grip on his arm, which is probably the only reason they’re still together at all.

They come to some kind of stop, Derek poised over Stiles’ body and taking the brunt of the debris still coming down.

A rock bounces off the side of Derek’s head and lands on Stiles’ forehead. It just kind of sits there in the middle of his forehead, but he doesn’t want to move at all to dislodge it. Moving might set them sliding again: he can’t see what they’re resting on but everything will be unstable.

Everything comes to a stop, and Derek eases away from him slowly. It lets the rain pound down on his face. Which - not cool, but Stiles still isn’t moving.

Derek looks around. “We need to get out of here.”

“Yeah, no shit. Jeep’s a little far away, though.”

Derek hesitates, still mostly poised over Stiles. “The tunnels. The house was bulldozed, but the tunnels are still there, and they’re concrete.”

“How far?” Stiles blinks against the rain. It’s maybe lightening up a little?

“Not far,” Derek says, and carefully moves so he’s kneeling and mostly upright. Nothing dislodges, and they’re not suddenly buried under more mud and shale, so Stiles cautiously gets up on his elbows.

They both get up slowly. There are some trees knocked over about twenty feet from them, and the whole side of the overlook has sheared off, but it’s not calamitous. Derek points off at a right angle from the landslide, so Stiles starts picking his way carefully in that direction.

Everything’s slick and unstable, and his heart’s pounding loud in his ears.

Derek’s going the same pace as him - werewolf speed wouldn’t do him any good on this ground.

Stiles wills the rain away, but it’s not as easy to make stop as it was to make start.

They’re nearly out, nearly on solid ground again, when Stiles slips. He flails around to keep upright - he’s good at that particular flail by now - but the ground slides out from underneath him. He catches himself on one hand, but that was - wow, that was a mistake. Stiles rolls, cradling his arm, which feels like it’s on fire.

Derek crouches over him. “Are you okay?”

“No, asshole,” Stiles snaps. “I think I broke my arm.”

Derek rolls his eyes and demands, “Can you move?”

Stiles considers for a moment, weighing the pain against the whole probability of death thing, then stretches his uninjured arm for Derek to pull him up. Derek stands, brings Stiles with him easily, and continues to hold onto him until they’re past the edge of debris from the landslide.

They can go faster then, since it’s just muddy and not unstable. Derek takes them into the trees, well off any paths, and then abruptly drops into a crouch. Stiles nearly runs into him, then watches as Derek clears wet leaves and a thin layer of dirt away from . . . what looks like more wet dirt.

It’s wet dirt with a handle, though, and Derek hauls it up, arms and back flexing in a way that indicates that no human would be able to open the door. There’s a set of steps down into a dark tunnel and a small nylon bag right inside the door. “Go,” Derek says, and Stiles doesn’t hesitate, just walks down into the dark.

The tunnels are warmer than outside: not as warm as it was earlier in the day, but the whole absence of freak storm thing really helps. Stiles stands at the bottom of the steps and cradles his arm against his chest, just watching as Derek carefully closes the door and backs down the steps at the same time. The stormy twilight fades into pitch dark as the door closes, and when then the sound of the rain cuts dramatically too.

“So, any lights around here? Not all of us have night vision.”

“Give me a minute,” Derek says.

Stiles can hear a zipper, and then a whirring noise that he can’t place. A dim flashlight beam eases into being, and Stiles can see Derek working the hand crank. He’s got the little nylon bag tucked under his arm, and looks frankly ridiculous. Six feet of muscled, shirtless, muddy werewolf spinning a little hand crank on a flashlight that looks like a toy.

“Where now, boss?”

The sarcastic lift of Derek’s eyebrow would probably be visible even in complete darkness. Those babies are really dedicated to communicating in their own language.

“Hey, your creepy family murder-tunnels, your show.”

Derek tilts his head as if to say ‘fair.’ “There’s an exit near the highway. Nothing smells too stale, which means there’s still airflow, so there shouldn’t be any cave-ins on the way.”

“Woah, cave-ins?”

“Yes, Stiles,” Derek says impatiently. “These were built to last, but it’s been eight years since anyone used them.”

Stiles swallows. “Right.”

They start walking.

The tunnels are musty but not choking, and Derek keeps winding the flashlight, which Stiles is pretty sure is just for his benefit.

“How far to the highway?” Stiles’ voice sounds a little odd: he’s gonna put it down to the acoustics and not the throbbing pain that refuses to stay localized to his arm.

“Couple miles.”

Stiles can - he can make that. But after, they’ll be in the rain again. “Hey, do you have your phone? See if someone’ll pick us up.”

“Left it at the loft,” Derek says.

Stiles nods at Derek’s back, then considers how to get his own phone out. It’s in his left front pocket, but with his left arm broken, that’ll be tricky. He sighs. “Can you get mine out, then?”

Derek turns around and flashes the light in his face. Stiles squints at him angrily. “This whole arm thing isn’t making it easy to get in my pockets.”

Derek huffs out a long-suffering sigh, but gives off cranking the flashlight and steps into Stiles’ space. The flashlight stays on, which makes Stiles feel a little vindicated: he _knew_ those things didn’t need to be wound constantly. Derek slips his hand into Stiles’ pocket, knuckles brushing against Stiles’ thigh through the thin material of the lining, and Stiles is left with suddenly trying very hard to think boner-averting thoughts.

He shouldn’t react so much just to this: he’s had people actually touch his dick now, and this isn’t done with any kind of sexy intent. But it’s _Derek_ , which means Stiles has to scramble to think about Finstock and corpses.

“Huh,” Derek says, sounding surprised. “I didn’t think you’d be able to get signal.”

Stiles shrugs. He doesn’t really think about it: cell phones are designed to get service. “What point are magic powers if you’ve got a limited service area? Call Scott.”

Derek taps his phone for a couple seconds and then hits speaker. They listen to it ring, and then to Scott’s voicemail. It’s not really a surprise. Universal constant: Scott doesn’t answer his phone.

“Dad next.”

His dad picks up on the second ring, but it sounds like he’s outside and there’s an ambulance going Code 3 in the background. Stiles feels his stomach drop even before his dad says apologetically that he’s stuck with a six-car pileup that’s resulted in two assaults.

They go through the rest of the pack: Lydia demands to know if he’s in imminent danger of death and then refuses to leave her house since he’s not, Isaac doesn’t have a car, or spare keys to Derek’s, Kira’s not allowed out in this weather. Liam and Malia both don’t have licenses, so there’s no point calling them.

“Do we have to go through everyone else in your contacts?” Derek asks, deceptively mild.

“Look, I’ve got a broken arm and I’m not gonna make it all the way into town without passing out. Try Miss D. next.”

He mostly knows Miss D. from parties, but he’s made a point to stop by the library when she’s Frank, and Miss D. still likes him and has reiterated more than once that he should call if he ever needs help.

“You’ve reached the wild world of Miss Double Dee. Leave a message.”

Derek is judging Stiles with his face. Stiles sticks his tongue out at him. Derek ends the call. “Anyone else, or can we go now?”

Stiles sighs, dejected. “No, we should go. You’re carrying me if I pass out, though.”

They start walking again. Stiles is starting to feel the cold from being stuck in sopping wet, muddy clothes. He tries not to shiver, though, because Derek’s not even wearing a shirt, and only has one sandal left. It’s not that far, anyway, and his dad’ll finish with the accident, or the rain will let up. He runs father than two miles almost every day, and this is just walking.

Stiles tries to keep his breathing slow and even, but he’s feeling really not great. He’d probably go so far as to say ‘awful.’ Stiles stumbles on the perfectly flat floor and stumbles into the dusty wall, and it jars his arm. He can’t help but let out a pained whine. “Okay, gotta stop for a bit.”

Derek looks at him, then lets out a sigh. “If you get hypothermia and die it’s going to be your own fault.”

“Cool,” Stiles says, and slides down the wall until he’s sitting propped against it. He closes his eyes and ignores the white creeping in at the edges of his vision. He just needs to rest, then he can keep going.

A hand grabs his shoulder, and Stiles startles awake. “Shit, how long was I asleep?”

“Long enough for your friend to call back,” Derek said.

“Oh, thank God. Is she coming to get us?”

“Yeah, she said it’d be probably twenty-five minutes with the roads like this. But with you looking like that, we should go now.” Derek holds out an arm to pull him up, and Stiles takes it gratefully. He’s feeling a lot wobbly.

He hisses in pain as his broken arm shifts. The whole thing is just looking gross, with most of his arm pale and his wrist all gross and swollen and ecchymotic. Stiles grits his teeth and starts walking. Derek sort of hovers at his side, not quite touching him but seemingly prepared to catch him if he collapses. It’d be irritating, but Stiles thinks there’s a very real danger of collapse. The white around the edges of his vision hasn’t faded, and he’s starting to feel a little loopy.

They make it to another set of stairs after what seems like an age, and Derek opens the door. Stiles blinks. It’s not particularly sunny out, but it’s still afternoon, and the cloud cover has faded from storm intensity. There’s barely even a drizzle coming down. It feels too bright for his sort of apocalyptic day so far.

Derek sets the flashlight and the little nylon bag he’d carried the whole way at the top of the steps next to a matching one, then closes the door. He jerks his head. “The highway’s about 500 feet that way.”

Stiles stumbles that direction, no longer able to contain his shivering now that there’s a breeze. It was warm verging on hot this morning, and now he’s fucking shivering.

They hit the edge of the woods right by the Welcome To Beacon Hills sign, and Miss D’s big hunter-style SUV is already there. Stiles grins, and can’t stop grinning, because someone who’s not part of his pack liked him enough to come get him, and he’s going to get to a hospital and get some good pain meds for his arm. It’s gonna be great.

Miss D. rolls down the passenger side window as they walk up and leans over to get a look at them. “Oh, honey, you look like shit.”

“Nice to see you, too.”

“Get in the back, honey, I’ll take you to the hospital. Your pretty, too.”

Derek pulls the door open, and there’s a blanket spread out over the whole back seat. Stiles gets in first, because no way in hell is he going to be able to close the door himself. He leans back and closes his eyes and enjoys the warmth and the comfort of being on the way to medical attention. The door slams and Derek reaches over him and carefully draws a seatbelt over him, tucking the shoulder strap behind his shoulder like he’s a kid again. Feeling safe and cared for, Stiles maybe blacks out a little bit.

 


	7. This ain't no place for no better man

They come to a stop, but everything’s still quiet like it’s woods. Stiles might still be sleeping, actually. He’s all warm, and he can feel Derek next to him, and Derek would never be next to him for sleeping if he was awake. Or something. Working that out would take more effort than he’s willing to put in right now.

“The tree,” someone says. Miss D? When did Miss D. get here? There’s Derek talking, too, and other words, but all Stiles can think about is the tree.

“No, I dun wanna go back to the tree,” Stiles says in a frantic sleep-drugged slur, trying to wake himself up enough to open his eyes and move and run away. He’s not sure where they are, but they’ve stopped, and the nemeton in the land of the living and the land of the dead have both haunted his dreams.

He hears a sharp inhalation, and then someone warm squeezes his hand. “Oh, honey, no. There’s just a normal tree down across the road, and your werewolf needs to go move it.”

Stiles’ eyes pop open, and he stares at Miss D. in shock as Derek goes tense beside him. “You’re both safe with me, honey,” she says, and Stiles is still confused, because she’s wearing her face but not her hair, and she’s not supposed to know about werewolves. “I don’t practice anymore, and even when I did I’d never have sent anyone to the damn tree or killed them any other way. Now, pretty-boy, if you could clear the road? Stiles needs a hospital sooner rather than later.”

Derek gets out of the car, but leaves the door open. Glancing briefly past Miss D. - he doesn’t want to take his eyes off her for too long - he can see the remains of a landslide here, too, the other lane partially obscured by debris and a small tree lying across the road. Derek heaves it completely off the road, then climbs back in. Miss D. starts driving again.

“So you’re a -”

“Full time librarian, part time drag queen, and former druid,” she says. “You caught me while I was doing a matinée at that retirement home where they’ve got the creepy Argent man tucked away, which is why I couldn’t get back to you sooner.”

“Okay,” Derek says, then falls silent.

Stiles can’t quite seem to get words to work, or he’d tell Miss D. how awesome she is. She’s a druid and also a normal non-homicidal person! That’s like a superpower, probably. He just looks out the window at what his superpowers caused: so far he’s batting a thousand for destruction.

They get to the hospital between one blink and the next, and then Derek’s carefully pulling him out of the car like he doesn’t want to wake him up. It’s kind of awkward, so Stiles adds some of his own momentum, which is even more awkward but at least faster. Miss D. leans over before Derek closes the door and asks, “Do you want me to come in?”

“No,” says Derek. “Thank you.”

Stiles makes it into the ER under his own power, and then could nearly cry in relief that Melissa’s at the admitting desk. He gets admitted in record time and no one tries to deny Derek visitation even though he’s half-naked and covered in mud. Well, whatever, Stiles caused a whole damn natural disaster, probably no one has any room to care because they’re too busy with the aftermath. Melissa gets through X-ray at some kind of superhuman speed, too, and he didn’t know nurses could order them, but go Melissa. She tucks a blanket around him, too, and then says, “I have to go see other patients, but I’ll see you before you check out, okay?”

Stiles nods, and she disappears.

A doctor comes along fast enough that he’s got to be terrified of Melissa. It’s good to have connections. He looks at the X-ray before he looks at Stiles’ wrist and pronounces it a break.

Stiles and Derek snort derisively at the same time. “Uh, yeah, Doc,” Stiles says. “I’ve been kind of feeling the bone ends grind together for the last hour.”

He looks over and nods, seemingly unperturbed. “Let’s get that sorted out, then.”

They clean it, which is painful, and set it, which is worse, and then the doctor takes another scan and prints a cast for him, which is awesome. “Okay, this is waterproof, so you can shower normally, but you still want to avoid jarring your arm against anything, and come back in six weeks.”

It’s the fastest Stiles has ever had a broken bone dealt with, and his cast looks kind of badass. Or, y’know, perfect for a supervillain, which is shaping up to be the right career path for him.

Awesome.

 


	8. To call home

Since Derek had sent Miss D. home and no cab is going to pick them up looking the way they do, Derek runs to grab his car.

Stiles lurks around the waiting room while the pharmacy fills his prescription. He texts his dad that he’s fine and safe - he’s probably still busy with emergency stuff, but he’ll be happy to know about it when he gets a chance, and then snapchats Lydia and Scott a picture of his cast.

Derek’s back in record time, his awful car just as recognizable as the Camaro when it pulls into the parking lot.

Stiles goes out to meet him, and doesn’t get rained on at all. The storm has passed.

Derek apparently took the time to shower and put a towel down on his passenger seat even though his car has definitely seen worse than a little mud. Or maybe a lot of mud.

Stiles slides in the passenger seat. “Hey, can we go back to your place? I kind of feel like shit, but the whole anchor thing seems a little more important now.”

“You think?”

Stiles doesn’t really have any words left to fill the ride to Derek’s loft. He’s hurting and he feels scraped raw inside. First and foremost, he doesn’t want to be alone.

Derek parks in the underground parking garage, weirdly full of other people’s cars now. It’s still hard to think of this as being a legit apartment building instead of Derek’s creepy batcave, despite the ads he’s seen around town the past month or so. But the elevator’s operational, and even though he’s the only one on the top floor the hallway is all de-creepified. It’s noticeably like having a rich creature of the night friend rather than a deeply disturbing creature of the night friend.

He even gets judgemental looks from the only other person on the elevator! She gets off on three, though, and doesn’t actually say anything.

“Hit the shower,” Derek says when they get in. “I’ll grab you some spare clothes, but you’re not sitting on any of my furniture like that. Do you need to eat with your painkillers?”

Stiles stops walking and looks at the bottle. “Uh, yeah.”

He leaves the bottle on Derek’s coffee table and heads to the bathroom. “Spare towels?”

“I know you’ve pawed through the bathroom cabinets, Stiles. Use whatever you need.”

Stiles nods, even though Derek probably can’t see him anymore.

Showering hurts, but it’s not as agonizing as walking was earlier, with his arm braced the way it is. And getting clean feels amazing. He uses Derek’s fancy organic scent-free everything and watches what look like pounds of dirt go down the drain. He doesn’t stretch it out too long, though: he wants his drugs and then to lie down on the couch and try not to feel anything as he gets an anchor in place.

When he turns the water off, Derek immediately yells, “Clothes are right outside the door!”

He pats himself carefully dry with one of Derek’s towels and then grabs the sweats and T-shirt. The shirt fits surprisingly well, at least in the shoulders.

Derek’s got grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup on the island: nothing Stiles would have to use both hands for. One of the places also has Stiles’ pain meds next to it, childproof cap already removed.

Stiles downs one of the pills and eats the food Derek’s made him. He ends up eating both his sandwiches and half of one of Derek’s before he feels full, and then he sits back and sighs in satisfaction. Derek’s a surprisingly good cook, and his painkillers are starting to kick in.

“Do you want another sandwich?” Derek asks, just watching him. He looks kind of . . . intent.

“Uh, no, I’m good.”

Derek looks away then, and takes their dishes to the sink. “Go sit down.”

Stiles sets himself down on the couch carefully, because he’s flopped down on his bed with a broken bone before and it’s not fun. “Did I ever tell you that the nogitsune was a total control freak?”

After a moment, Derek says, “I thought he was about chaos.”

Stiles gestures broadly with his unbroken arm. “Yeah, but, like _controlled_ chaos. He wanted everything to be his show. And I don’t want to feel like I’m fighting myself again, not all the time.”

“So you - yeah, no, that’s not how an anchor works.”

“Maybe not for _you_ ,” Stiles says petulantly.

Derek abandons the dishes and comes to sit on the couch, lifting Stiles’ legs out of the way and then putting them back down across his lap. It’s a little weird - Stiles isn’t much for casually touching people, and he hadn’t thought Derek was, either. But then Derek starts pulling Stiles’ pain, and it’s not weird, just _amazing_. Stiles sighs and lets the tension flow out of him.

“You used to get panic attacks, right?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“How does anyone know anything in this town?”

Stiles nods at the ceiling. “Fair.”

“So how’d you get through those?” Derek sounds really patient, not just the kind of patient he is when he’s about to slam you into something for being wrong.

“Mostly I didn’t, dude. I’d hyperventilate and pass out, or my dad would hold me until it’s over. The ones I’ve had the past couple years, either someone would kiss me or something even more awful would come up and I’d have to deal with that.”

“What kind of feeling came with it, though, when it was people helping you?”

Stiles drums the fingers of his uninjured hand against his chest. Talking about this is - like, okay, Derek’s not the worst person to talk to about this. He’s not being judgmental, and he’s managed to teach other people stuff with control, and he’s never talked about what’s gone on in private with them. “It felt like . . . home. Like, they’re the people who matter. I don’t know, they’re my pack.”

“So use pack as your anchor,” Derek says, like it’s obvious.

“I thought the whole thing was all ‘oh no, using people as an anchor is bad,’” Stiles says in a vicious falsetto that sounds nothing like Malia. “Plus the whole thing where I sucked the life out of my mom and tried to do the same with Scott.”

Derek snorts. “Pack as a group, as an idea. Not as particular people.”

Stiles thinks about his dad and Scott, Malia and Kira and Lydia and Derek. Yeah, he can maybe do that.

 


	9. Every time I close my eyes, I think

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I said 'a chapter a day' I was being a filthy liar, apparently. In my defense: Bitecon happened and I was exhausted. Much thanks to ereborne and ademska for their help - note that any remaining errors are mine.

Stiles has survived finals and started absolutely zero natural disasters. He is both happy and proud, enough that he’s humming as he picks up all the chips he’s supposed to take to the party.

The trunk ends up full to overflowing, and Stiles stares at the chips kind of dubiously. There are going to be like twenty pizzas, too, and Lydia was in charge of making there be vegetable platters, but there are probably going to be a lot of people. Stiles gives a mental shrug and puts away the cart. Lydia, presumably, knows what to expect from a party she’s in charge of.

He drives to Derek’s and somehow manages to pick up all of the bags at once, though it does mean he has to awkwardly use one knuckle to buzz in instead of digging out his misappropriated key.

Kira meets him at the elevator, already grinning and excited. She takes several of the bags from him, leaving him able to walk more or less normally and not carry anything on his broken arm. “You’re the last one of us to get here! Everything looks like it’s going to be super awesome.”

“Yeah? Is Lydia freaking out yet?”

“Oh my God, no, she is so on top of things. How does she even do that? Like, the parties I threw in New York it was just whatever to drink and then food either happened or it didn’t, and it was never this many people.”

The loft door is already open on the top floor, and Lydia’s directing Scott and Malia in setting things out on a long table.

“Yo,” Stiles says. Scott grins at him and Lydia sends him a glance that’s not even scathing.

Derek is on the phone with someone, sounding pissed off, but he jerks his chin in acknowledgement before snapping, “For the fifth time, this is not a prank.”

Which reminds Stiles to dig in his pocket with his free hand and detour to Derek before setting the chips down. He hands Derek back the credit card he’d misappropriated earlier, and Derek just rolls his eyes and sticks it back in his pocket.

Malia hisses to Lydia, sounding annoyed and confused, “I thought credit cards were supposed to be like toothbrushes! Why did you make me get my own?”

“They are, honey,” Lydia says. “Stiles is just a criminal, and Derek’s his enabler.”

Stiles gives her a smacking kiss on the cheek, and she actually smiles in response. “Where do you want these?”

“Cut the tops off close to where the chips start and put them at that end. Are you really wearing that?”

Stiles looks down at his T-shirt and jeans. “Yes?”

“No,” she says. “Since you’re so comfortable with Derek’s stuff, grab one of his shirts.” She gives him an appraising look. “It’ll be a little loose, but it’ll fit better than anything you actually own.”

Stiles obediently trudges up the stairs. Derek’s bed has been moved up here for the occasion, right in the middle of the master bedroom he seems to only use for storage. There’s a T-shirt on the bed, and Stiles just grabs that, because it’s at least a different color and so at least he tried. It fits a little better in the shoulders than he’s used to, and it’s got a V-neck instead of a crew-neck, so Lydia should be happy.

He finds the key to the room on top of the dresser, and locks up behind him when he leaves. It’s one of the few keys he doesn’t have a copy of somewhere, but it’d just be weird to get a key to the guy’s bedroom, especially since he never sleeps there.

When he gets back downstairs, people have started to arrive. It’s kind of freakishly early to show up: the invitation had said 8pm and it’s almost exactly 8 now. Stiles eyes them for signs of nefarious supernatural intent, but they mostly seem interested in vodka. Lydia spots him a few minutes later as he’s mixing punch and she’s ushering more people in and gives him an approving nod.

The loft fills up fast, and it seems like there are more people than there were for the blacklight party. That’s impossible, though: Danny had thrown that party, and everyone loves Danny and also phosphorescence. It _feels_ crowded, though, enough that Stiles only lasts through a couple slices of pizza before he has to escape to the balcony. He leans against the balustrade, closes his eyes, and breathes deep. There’s a breeze coming in and chasing off the lingering heat of the day, and Stiles tries to feel along it without doing anything. It’s hard, because he has to keep bringing his pack to mind to make sure he’s in balance, but he’s aware of it as a feeling now, which is something. It feels like a muscle just discovered and noodly from overwork. After a few minutes he gives up and opens his eyes again.

Derek is right next to him, and Stiles flails backwards. Derek smirks, and passes Stiles a drink. Stiles takes a sip, and it’s _good_ whisky, way better than the stuff that was on the table. He’s drunk enough shitty whisky at shitty parties to know. He settles back against the railing, close enough to feel the heat radiating off Derek. “I used to be better at crowds.”

Derek shrugs. “I used to like barbecue. Things change.”

They stand there while Stiles finishes his whisky, and it’s more comfortable than he’s been in silence in a long while. Derek nods back inside. “C’mon, you wanted to let loose a little.”

Stiles gives him a dubious and judgmental look. He has not once expressed that desire to Derek, and he’d have thought the whole fire thing would have Derek super enthusiastic about Stiles being in control at all times.

Derek just raises an eyebrow at him in challenge, so Stiles follows him in and to the kitchen. The good whisky’s stashed behind the Comet under the sink. Derek fills his glass like it’s water, then looks at him pointedly.

Stiles sags, then tosses it all back. It goes down smooth and delightful, and is probably older than he is. He gets Derek’s point, too: he’s got an anchor, and people watching out for him. He can’t stay vigilant forever, and if he’s going to let his guard down, it’s best to do it where someone he trusts can keep an eye on him. So Stiles downs shot after shot until he’s pliant and amenable when Derek steers him towards the dancing, then keeps getting passed drinks by the pack after that. Lydia passes him water, because she’s Lydia, but everyone else is passing him punch or whatever. It’s - nice. It feels nice. The room ends up spinny in a sort of cozy way that’s totally different from the skewed perceptions of being possessed.

Someone kisses him, a lithe tall person whose gender he can’t tell under their vest. Stiles sort of blinks stupidly and keeps his hands well clear, but it’s a nice kiss, so he kisses them back for a while. They stop, and slide a hand down to grab his ass, and then disappear into the crowd.

It leaves Stiles feeling cold and a little off-balance. It’s harder to get back to equilibrium with as drunk as he is, but he takes a deep breath and tries to pinpoint his pack in the crowd. Scott and Kira are dancing close off to one side, Lydia and Malia are allowing almost the entire rest of the first line to try and dance with them. Derek’s standing at the bottom of the stairs, glaring off anyone who’d want to go up them. Liam is belligerently eating carrot sticks. He takes a deep breath, lets it out, and goes in search of another drink.

-

Stiles wakes up with evil, evil sunlight stabbing holes through his brain and drool sticking him to Derek’s couch. He whimpers and turns his head away from the window and there, just in reach, is glorious, glorious water. Water and _Tylenol_ , and he will marry whoever set them out for him.

He downs the pills and drinks the water all in one fell swoop. If he moves very slowly and drinks more water, he might even avoid throwing up.

He levers himself slowly upright and looks around for Derek. Derek’s in the kitchen again, and Stiles would never have pegged him for domestic except he’s always cooking for Stiles. He starts towards the kitchen, stumbles over his shoes, and miraculously doesn’t drop the water glass. When he’s planted in his usual chair, he rasps, “Thanks, dude, I needed that.”

“Don’t call me dude,” Derek says, seemingly on automatic as he scrapes some pale green stuff off a cutting board and into a pan.

“Yeah,” Stiles says, with no intention of stopping. He blinks blearily around, and everything’s all tidy. Right around the couch is the only bit of chaos left, and the windows are open to air out the loft. He doesn’t remember helping at all, so Derek probably did all of this after he was asleep. “Everyone else gone?”

“Scott and Kira made sure everyone got home okay. You were already passed out.” Derek grabs a pitcher from the fridge and pours Stiles more water. Stiles feels himself slowly rehydrating - he’s like halfway back from raisin, now.

Stiles nods acknowledgement, then focuses on drinking water and not letting his head fall off until Derek slides a plate of something with artichokes and eggs and cheese in front of him. Stiles picks at it, but the first bite is amazing, and the perfect kind of greasy and cheesy to go with a hangover. “Mm. You take such good care of me.”

It’s said sort of absently - or, no, not absently, but because the food is fucking delicious - but Derek looks away and looks kind of embarrassed before he gets a scowl in place. Stiles narrows his eyes at Derek’s profile, brain resistant to starting up while it’s still mired in whisky. He works through to some thought about intimacy, and then has to look back at his plate while his cheeks heat. It’s not like the statement’s any less true when they’re speaking more broadly than breakfast.

Stiles clears his throat, loud in the silence. “Do you want me to clear out, or should I help you clean up?”

Derek looks down at his own plate. “You’re welcome here.”

Stiles is too hungover for feelings.

They finish eating in silence, and then Derek does the dishes again. Stiles starts picking up the stuff directly around the couch, including the chip bag he’d half-crushed with his legs.

The two of them move around each other in the loft, comfortably in synch like they’ve been doing this for years. They have, sort of, for a couple years, though usually they’re cleaning up mayhem and murder and not the after-effects of a party. Still, it feels _right_ in a sort of gross domestic way that feels weird with having dated Derek’s cousin. Probably more weird for Stiles having not noticed in - however long this has been going on.

They get the apartment clean, just a couple big garbage bags piled by the door. “You could use the shower,” Derek says pointedly.

Stiles can smell himself, and also still feels utterly disgusting, so he can’t even complain about Derek’s comment. He just stumbles up the stairs and into Derek’s room to appropriate more clothes and then heads into the bathroom. The hot water eases some of the pounding in his head.

He doesn’t shower for very long, but by the time he’s out Derek has still managed to get the bed back downstairs. He’d suspect wizardry, but he’s kind of got the market cornered.

Stiles doesn’t have any spare underwear, and borrowing Derek’s seems like crossing some kind of line, so he’s freeballing it in Derek’s sweats as he chucks his stuff - well, his stuff and Derek’s shirt - in Derek’s washer.

Derek’s on the couch dicking around on an iPad, and the garbage is gone, too. Stiles curls up next to him and tucks his feet under Derek’s thigh. He lasts about a minute and a half of just trying to chill and let his headache fade before he has to arch and get his phone out.

Lydia has texted him: _If you finally get around to it, I checked and Derek has condoms in the bathroom._

His heart jolts hard enough that Derek puts a soothing hand on his ankle, and he texts back furiously. _How did you know???? D:_

_Even if I hadn’t seen you look at each other, the nogitsune fucked with him even more than me and your dad._

Stiles just texts her back distressed emoticons. A lot of them. Then he puts his arms over his face, feeling hot and cold all over. He doesn’t want to look at his phone. It’s not like - he’s grown in the last couple years. Emotionally. He can care about more than three people and a ghost, now. But Derek snuck in, and he takes up unexpectedly large tracts of emotional real estate that Stiles has just kind of not looked at. “I love you,” he tells the crook of his elbow resentfully.

Derek’s hand convulses on his ankle, and Stiles’ phone buzzes in his hand. He ignores it and peeks at Derek. Derek’s just looking at him, completely frozen.

Stiles can feel himself blushing furiously. This is, traditionally, when the subject of his affections tells him to fuck off.

They stare at each other. It stretches out pretty painfully, and Stiles would bolt except Derek is holding his ankle. Derek loosens his hand, seemingly unconsciously, and slides his hand up Stiles’ shin.

“I don’t - I don’t want anything from you.”

Derek looks confused and a little hurt, and Stiles has to sit upright so he can have this conversation for real. “No, like, I know - Jennifer and Kate used you, and Braeden really liked your money, so your track record - it’s like, mostly evil or dying horribly or both, from what I know, and I know you’re probably not into dudes, and I don’t want anything from you, I just thought you should know.”

Derek presses his lips together like he’s hiding a smile and dips his chin. When he looks up, his eyes are filled with - something, and he reaches carefully for Stiles’ face. It’s an act of will not to flinch, even though Stiles knows Derek wouldn’t seriously hurt him.

Derek cradles the side of Stiles’ head in his hand and leans in slowly over Stiles’ legs. He stops a bare couple inches away and meets Stiles’ eyes. God, how are his eyes even real? Stiles stares into them as his heart picks up speed. “Me, too,” he says.

Stiles can’t really contain a grin, but leans in to kiss Derek anyway, because that’s what all the proximity was for, right? The smile he can’t wipe away makes the kiss awkward, but it’s still fantastic. The stubble is new, but kind of great, and Stiles brings a hand up to Derek’s jaw to feel more of it. His legs end up all kinds of in the way, too, but Stiles doesn’t want any of this to stop.

Eventually he needs to breath, though, and his side is cramping, so they break apart and Stiles stares at Derek in wonder. “How -”

Stiles wants to ask how long, but it doesn’t matter: Stiles was possessed, then with Malia, and is still underage. Whenever it started, Derek had legit reasons not to tell him. “How would you feel about, ah.” Fuck it. “Will you fuck me?”

Derek makes a kind of broken noise and drops his head to Stiles’ shoulder, nose pressed close to his neck. “It’s moving fast.”

Stiles rubs his face along the side of Derek’s. “It’s Beacon Hills. We’ll probably be dead by the end of the summer. I don’t want to miss out.”

Derek talks directly into the side of Stiles’ neck, which is unfairly distracting. “That’s a terrible reason for -”

“I love you,” Stiles says firmly.

Derek rises fluidly to his feet and takes Stiles by the hand. “I can’t say no to you.”

Stiles stops, stands still, and his resistance makes Derek turn to look at him. “You can, though. Like, I know I’m a dick, but you can always -”

Derek kisses him again. “I know. Now get in bed.” He disappears into the bathroom.

Stiles strips, dropping his clothes on the floor as he walks to the bed. Everything on it looks soft, and proves incredibly comfortable when he flops down on it. The sun slants over the bed, and Stiles isn’t used to being naked in the light of day.

Derek reemerges and then stops when he sees Stiles. Just stops and stares. Then he crosses to the bed in an instant, dropping a bottle of lube and a frankly ambitious strip of condoms on the comforter.

He strips, and Derek stripping has never been anything less than art. He’s all smooth unscarred skin stretched taut over muscle that ripples as he lowers himself slowly over Stiles. Then they’re kissing naked, and Stiles moans at how it feels. They make out until their erections are straining against each other, and then Derek slips down the bed and slicks his fingers.

He goes slow and careful, which leaves Stiles writhing and incoherent before Derek gets his dick in him. Even when Derek’s over him, thrusting deep, he’s slow and tender and it makes Stiles feel lost in it. He comes untouched and shuddering, and Derek follows shortly after.

Derek nuzzles into his neck a moment before he rolls away and gets up. Stiles tries to get his breath back and stares out the window. It’s started to drizzle, soft rain coming down with no threat of destruction. When Derek comes back with a cloth, Stiles ignores cleanup in favor of cuddling, because he feels amazing. He feels just - good. In every way. He runs his fingers through Derek’s hair as Derek wipes the jizz off his stomach. Derek throws the cloth away, and wraps his arms around Stiles again. “How long can you stay?”

“A few more hours,” Stiles murmurs, and turns so that he’s the little spoon. Derek cuddles up behind him, and Stiles grabs the sheet that was displaced enough earlier to not be stuck under them.

Stiles is still facing the window, and the rain’s lightening up, though the sky’s still grey and close and cozy.

“It smells like growing things,” Derek says, right in his ear but quiet enough that it’s just intimate. “Outside.”

Stiles feels the last bit of worry leaching out of him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

They stay that way until the sky is darkening with dusk, and then Stiles has to drag himself home. “This isn’t a one-time thing, right?”

Derek gives him a deeply sarcastic look that makes Stiles grin and kiss him again. “Right. See you tomorrow, probably.”

-

Malia’s at his house again that Friday night, another of her dates from the lacrosse team dropping her off near midnight after a party. She climbs in his window smelling like cheap beer and pot, and doesn’t even say anything before she grabs some of his clothes and heads to the bathroom.

When she comes back, laying her wet hair on his pillow and spooning him, he says, “Have fun?”

“I don’t like high school,” she says. “Or any of this other stuff. You should install a dog door before school starts so that I can come in without having to stop being a coyote ever again.”

He puts his arm over hers and laces their fingers together. “Okay.”

Everything will be okay.


End file.
